Words and Works from a Seattle Author

You, Your Money, and Me

To be honest, I started this blog because I want your money. That’s not the only reason, but it’s definitely in the mix.

As a writer, I want people (i.e., you) to read my books. I’ve worked hard writing them, I’m proud of them, and I want folks to read them and enjoy them. I think my books are worth something, though, so I (generally) don’t give them away for free, which means readers must part with some of their money.

Ergo, I want your money.

To increase the working probability of this scheme, I began this blog. The theory was that, the more people who read about my books, about me, the greater the probability that some of you will decide to take a chance and spend $5 on a book that took me a year to create.

$5…for a year’s work.

Some of you have taken a chance on my books, and that pleases me, not because I’ve got your money, but because you’ve got my book, but this blog, as a form of self-promotion, well, it’s a bit of a bust, and that salient fact was clear pretty early on in the process. It’s proved to be better than a Facebook page, better than Twitter, better than every other venue, but still, I’m not getting rich. I could do more–conventions, speaking engagements, mass-marketing emails, repeated BuyMyBook bombs on social media–but experience, observation, and written opinion from writers like Delilah Dawson over at whimsydark concur:

Self-promotion is a trap.

It’s a trap because it encourages magical thinking. It encourages us to believe that, if we only did this thing or that, in exactly the right way at exactly the right time, we could “break out” of the pack. We read the stories of authors selling tens of thousands of copies of their self-published book, and we think: I just need to do what that author is doing.

It’s a trap because it creates a time-intensive death-vortex of diminishing returns. You can spend hours and hours on promotional activities, but at a certain point, each hour spent provides smaller and smaller benefit until you become “That Guy” and it actually starts working against you. Social media are fickle, that way.

And it’s a trap because it feels like progress. In a business where, as I said, it can take a year’s work to go from Page One to hitting the shelves, the busy-work of self-promotion feels like you’re actually accomplishing something. You make a post, get a few “likes,” or see a tweet re-tweeted and it’s instant feedback. You get a new follower on Instagram or Tumblr and you think, “A new reader!” These are illusions, built of mist and dream-smoke. And we know it. We just don’t admit it to ourselves.

At best, a full-time writer can only control three of those items. As a part-time (at best) writer, I can usually only control two of them.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do any self-promotion. I’m saying we need to be realistic about it, and weigh the time spent against the proven results. It’s a simple ROI calculation: is the time I’m spending on this doing anything for my books, or for me as a writer?

This blog, nearly three years old, now, long ago proved that it was not cost-effective as a way of separating you from your money. I’ve kept it up, though, because it has kept me writing during these difficult years of death and family turmoil. I’ve also learned a ton while writing it, and that has made me a better writer, overall.

So don’t worry. Your wallet is safe.

Of course, if you’re interested, for under $25 you can get the entire Fallen Cloud Saga (five volumes!) for your Kindle.

Interesting thoughts. To a certain extent, I find it comforting to know that even if I were to overcome my inherent laziness (especially regarding social media), I would likely not find huge commercial success. That gives me psychological permission to focus on the blog as a writing exercise. It also gives me an excuse for being rather late (according to my self-imposed deadline) in getting my next post finished.

I’m just glad I don’t write novels for a living. Friends of ours, who depends solely on their books for a living, agonize over what sort of self-promotion and how much. Publishers only do so much, even for best-selling authors.

My posts average 600-700 words, but I generally only do two of them a week. That comes to 60-75k words/year.
An every-weekday post of 300 words comes to 78k/year, so that’s comparable.

Technically, anything over 40k is a novel, but in reality, I’d say it’s anything over 70k. My books usually come in between 120-140k, which means that my blogs constitute about half a full-length novel.

For comparison, the first book in LOTR trilogy is half a million words, and Stephen King regularly goes 400k+.

That confirms my position: as pure self-promotion, blogging is a trap.